En Route

Somehow I've made it this far without explaining why this was all entirely worth it. I was thrilled to move to India. I have a restaurant background, and only Spain beats India in terms of what I wanna get into my mouth. That came out kind of weird, but I'm leaving it. There's also all the history, the art, the culture - and the incredible food! Mumbai is a coastal town, and my biggest food weakness is sea critters. We're spitting distance from Goa and the Maldives. I'm a mountain junky, meaning there is no topping the prospect of visiting the Himalayas. The Uttarakhand province is adventure paradise. In various parts of India there are jungles and elephants and tigers! Then there are the collateral benefits. Living in India means it is super cheap to fly to the rest of Asia and to Europe. Wifey and I could finally explore Germany, Singapore, Slovakia, Japan, Thailand, Norway and more. If she gets time off, but that's beside the point. There are endless reasons that I was absolutely stoked for the transfer.

There was the big city angle, too. Kel and me are both small town Montana kids. At one point I lived in Billings. That means my largest population experience was double hers. For the last 12 years the biggest town we've lived in had almost 50k people. The move we were about to make would take us from Williston, North Dakota, a town of 30k, to Mumbai. We'd also never lived anyplace where shoveling snow didn't claim a large chunk of one's time. Now to go to a place that gets around 8 feet of rain a year at an average temperature of 80°. In the name of my metric integration that means 242cm of rain at 27.2°C.

We wanted an adventure, and there was no better place for it. So it was time to get on that plane.

...

It was a very plain plane. It took off from a decidedly underwhelming airport. It was delightful.

The Williston airport consists of little more than a service counter and a TSA checkpoint. And a vending machine. The preboarding area is in a trailer dumped in behind the airport. There has been no effort to disguise this fact. It is a setting designed to minimize expectations. This is for a reason.

To fly out of Williston, one boards a "jet" with half the seating capacity of a school bus. It is hot. It is loud. It is cramped. By all appearances, the designer of the jet must have hated anyone that might be so insolent as to board his aircraft. I say "his" with confidence since these little bastards were built in the 1970's. My wife is always saying some nonsense about how it's not that bad. She is an even foot shorter than me. She also obviously suffers from some debilitating form of chronic positivism.

In spite of these failings, our little pile of crap on wings did have some redeeming features. The flight to Denver was blessedly short, clocking in at just over an hour. It would allow us to put the karry-on kitties all the way under the seat in front of us. That wouldn't come to seem important until later on.

Anyhow, we checked our bags containing all our remaining clothing and toiletries. It came out to something like 250lbs. Not terrible. The lady at the check desk was extremely amused by our pet situation. No matter where you are, when you have two cats as carry-ons, you get some looks. It's actually pretty fun. The crates are difficult to see into, and add a sense of mystery. Quincy, feeling abused, would occasionally offer a low, plaintive meow. That's what really furrowed the eyebrows and started the furtive whispers.

Then it was off to the TSA line. This little process involved extracting our grumpy felines from their enclosures and carrying them through the metal detector. The security theatre agents clearly had strong concerns that my cats were terrorists and I was their dupe. They eyed the lot of us distrustfully.

I figured that around takeoff we would really be in for a treat as the cats got their first taste of air travel. I expected yowling and thrashing, hissing and various fluid expulsions. Instead, I got some mild, pitiful cries from Quincy. Jimi was, as the saying goes, calmer than a Hindu cow. Landing certainly scared the living daylights out of them, but their respective reactions were much cooler than anticipated. Chock up one pleasant surprise! Even with all the noise (we were the first seats behind the wing) and a little rough air, the first leg of the trip went stunningly well. I was deeply suspicious. I thought it best to lie to Quincy at this point and tell her that the worst was over. It would be difficult to overstate the degree of this deception.

Our tickets had been booked by an agent at The Job. They did their task masterfully by getting us seats literally 30 rows apart in the flights after Williston. Upon arrival in Denver the first task we undertook was getting seats next to each other as married couples sometimes do. This also gave us the opportunity to pay for an upgrade. It was undoubtedly, completely, absolutely worth the couple hundred bucks to do this for the next flights. We also had to pay a per cat fee just as we had in Williston, but $125 each is such a small price to pay for the contemptuous affection of our little companions.

A note about customer service with Lufthansa: it's gonna take a little time. By that I mean a lot of time. But they will get it done. The staff is friendly and works super hard to be accommodating. They also seem to be writing the code for their computer system on the fly. It took 3-5 people around 40 minutes to get it done, all expressing Jedi-level concentration the entire time. And they made it happen for us. I love Germans.

With our tickets fixed up, we sat down to relax with the fur babies for a little bit. I bought carriers with a sweet fold-out sides made of mesh so they could move around and get some daylight and fresh air. This also got the attention of everyone in the vicinity again, and much amusement was had by all. Then our brief layover was finished and it was time to saddle up again. They were displeased when I folded up the accordion sides and Kel and I each took up a cat and boarded.

I've never flown anything but the cheapest economy seats, ever. Kelly flies all over for work and has a bazillion miles and gets upgraded all the time. So I was like a kid in a candy store with my extra 2.2" of leg room or whatever it is. I got a fancy tray table that folded into the arm rest, an adjustable head rest.. I was traveling in style!

We wound up seated in the 20's in a nice new Airbus A310. Plenty of space for carry on bags, tons of head room, excellent flight attendants.The free in-flight movies really are a boon on those 10 hour flights. The in-flight meals were good, too. There was, however, a small problem with putting the cats under the seats in front of us. The seats in economy plus are supported by a central column, and they have an adjustable footrest mounted to the back. The way this configuration worked out meant that only the person with the window seat could get the cat crate underneath. Kelly gets the window seat when we fly. Therefore, I spent about the next six hours trying to wrangle things such that there was a place for a) the cat, and b) my feet. Somewhere over the southern tip of Greenland I finally just decided to disregard airline protocol about how to stow pets. I turned the crate sideways and pulled it back under my legs instead of trying to force the thing under the seat in front of me. Voila! Suddenly I could sit comfortably. This was while i was intermittently napping and watching Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Sidenote: watch this movie, but not with the kids.

Kelly has learned to sleep like a champ in the air. Also, This was her third intercontinental trip inside ten days. She was dead to the world. Jimi, in her charge, maintained his silent vigil / intensive snoozing regiment. I dozed and watched bizarre and entertaining movies. Then, somewhere just over the edge of Northern Ireland, Quincy snapped out of her CBD coma and became very uncool. She was making all the angry cat noises and doing all the thrashing around. It took at least half an hour to get her to chill out. It would still be a few hours before i figured out why.

The landing into Frankfurt, Germany was a little up and down. Like in a bouncy,carnival ride type of way. I intuited that this was not a good thing. Sure enough, as we descended from the heavens like Perseus on Pegasus, I heard that telltale sound. It's a sound like an inverted hiccup. A sound like an esophagus that has infected sinuses. The sound of impending vomit. Drat. Nothing to be done now but assess the damage when an opportunity arose.

So we land in lovely Frankfurt. The view once we'd glided back beneath the cloud was at once serene and industrious. The geometric patchwork of fields in their spring splendor was a beauty to behold. Sadly, now that we were on the ground, it was dealing-with-cat-puke-time. I chose to view this as nature maintaining balance.

The Frankfurt airport is very nice except for two things. There is absolutely zero airflow. While it wasn't particularly hot, it somehow managed to be stifling. Secondly, to switch between our two Lufthansa flights required us to transit approximately half a mile of airport terminal. Luckily this gave us ample opportunity to find someplace to release our babies from cat prison and care for their issues, whatever those might be.

Kelly wanted to hurry up and get to our gate and recalibrate our seats as we had in Denver. I protested this and eventually got my way, which was to deal with the cats first and get to the gate second. We found our way to a handicapable bathroom well off the main concourse to use as a family unit. I was exceedingly paranoid that someone with both a disability as a pressing need to answer the call of nature would happen along while we were locked in the bathroom doing crazy cat person stuff, but that was the risk we had to take.

Jimi and Quincy were given a 15 minute furlough from cat jail so we could give them a snack and some water. At this point they had been confined for over 14 hours. Before we undertook the voyage, we had given the cats all they cared to eat and spoiled them to the best of our abilities for a couple of weeks. The day of the flight we'd taken their food away 6 hours before takeoff, and taken the water 3 hours before takeoff. This cruelty was in the interest off avoiding the inevitables of biology for as long as possible.

The preparations had worked flawlessly with Jimi. He wandered happily out of his kennel and greeted us in his characteristic fashion, which is to say he was practically wagging his tail. Quincy, on the other hand... I had heard her retching on the landing, but he is was merely the tip of her iceberg. I don't know whether it was a chain reaction or if the trouble had started with that little hissy fit over Scotland, but the smell hit me with alacrity. Out slumped a haggard and bedraggled black cat. The defeat in her eyes was the ghost of indignation left to rot. She was a mess of everything that could come out of her AND wind up upon her, in a sort of mermaid configuration. Going backward from her neck and shoulders the situation devolved steadily all the way back to her slimy little tail. Hoo boy.

There were a few things working to my advantage in this unfortunate situation. We'd had the foresight to bring a jumbo pack of baby wipes and a handful of cotton rags. There was a sink and paper towels to one side and a toilet to the other. And finally, Quincy was feeling too dejected to offer resistance to a vigorous scrubbing. Working against me were the clock, my jet lagged brain, and the sheer intensity of cleaning required. At top speed I broke down the little cat carrier and scraped what I could into the toilet. Kelly went to work on the kennel, I went to work on the cat.

After 15 glorious minutes of scrubbing and rinsing and pressing and drying, the situation had been remedied as well as it could possibly be given our circumstances. Quincy was certainly not happy, but also no longer looked clinically depressed. That may have something to do with the fact that after the humiliation of being cleaned had ended, I had to cram her back in her carrier. Despite the surge of pure adrenaline this shot into her bloodstream, I escaped the task without need of stitches. Then off at top speed to the gate to modify our seats if possible.

The ticket modification was a simple repeat of the Denver process, except this time we are seated in the true middle of economy plus. The seating of the jet was configured 2 - 4 - 2, two seats, an aisle, four seats, another aisle, and two more seats. We were in the middle of the middle, with a fellow traveler bookending us on each side. The underseat storage situation was now a little screwed up for both of us, but now we knew better than to try to fight it and simply didn't follow the rules from go. Mercifully, the flight crew turned a blind eye.

And thus we got underway for our second "night" aloft. Kelly again slept reasonably well, and I napped, watched movies, and covertly played with my cat. The airlines have strict rules about keeping them locked down in the jets and terminals, so I just opened the carrier narrowly and reached in to soothe her. I watched The Shape of Water. Skip that one unless you like some weird shit. I demi-watched the new version of The Magnificent Seven afterward to cleanse my pallet. This movie is a Western that is actually a superhero movie. I recommend enthusiastically to anybody that likes fun and isn't a movie snob.

By this point my mind wasn't really working normally, but in the fun way. The airline food had taken a delicious turn for the ethnic and i was enjoying it more than any sensible person enjoys airline food, ever. The last leg of the trip went rather quickly, and practically before I knew it, it was time to step out into the adventure that is Mumbai.